(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to sequence analysis method and apparatus, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for analyzing the sequence of a program described in an object language.
(2) Description of the Related Art
When developing a system using an object-oriented language, sequence diagram in UML (Unified Modeling Language) standardized by the OMG (Object Management Group) is considered an important document for implementation.
The sequence diagram indicates call relationships of methods (corresponding to functions in procedural language) in a group of classes related to a predetermined function, and is usually created for each function.
The number of sequence diagrams involved in a whole system, however, often amounts to the order of several hundreds to several thousands, making it difficult to, for example, check up the consistency of methods among the sequence diagrams.
To solve the problem, the sequence diagrams may be integrated into a single drawing to facilitate the checkup. In object-oriented language, however, class is a unit of atomic operation, and thus if the sequence diagrams are merely integrated into a single drawing to allow editing of members in a class, there arises in turn the difficulty of editing on a class-by-class basis.